WeeklyUpdates/2009-11-16

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Friends of the Tree

Aakash wrote in, "I'd like to nominate Aleksej as a friend of the tree for his great work in our latest Testday on Fennec 1.0 Beta 5. He filed 2 bugs on the day and, more importantly, acted as our resident community Testday host by greeting every person that joined the channel and sparking conversation throughout the day."

I can speak from experience that this kind of testing and coordination help is hugely valued and critical to the success of our community testing program and so I'm thrilled to second Aakash's nomination. -Asa

Development Updates

Firefox

( Projects | Status | Goals | People )

Firefox 3.6 (Namoroka)

• beta 3 refresh should be coming Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning
• beta 3 includes a components directory lockdown feature - johnath to blog about the details early this week
• code freeze for RC1 is scheduled for Wednesday but might be at risk; come to the Platform meeting tomorrow to discuss.

Firefox Future

• preliminary explorations on 3.7 work continue, see the projects page for more details.

Team News

Gecko

• News from the CrashKill front:
  • Today's discussion will be about how to determine if 3.6 will crash less than 3.5.x and 3.0.x. The way we do our crash report throttling makes comparing releases difficult--we have to guess on about five different variables when comparing releases.
  • Reminder: We now have the ability to block specific DLLs from loading. For the list of DLLs we intend to block, see bug 525103.
• News from Electrolysis:
  • 4 blockers until out-of-process-plugins (OOPP) land in mozilla-central preffed off, hopefully this week... lots of small issues being found, but few major ones.
  • Firefox 3.7 to have OOPP enabled by default, Windows and Linux. There will be no multi-process tabs, nor mac support.
  • demo of Fennec with multi-process tabs available: beginning additional work to make it less hacky
• GFX Update.
• Blockers:
  • P1: 4
  • P2: 50
  • P3: 0
  • Other: 28
• Team blocker numbers:
  • Layout: 7
  • Content: 8
  • GFX: 6
  • JS: 31

Branch work: Firefox 3.0.x / Firefox 3.5.x / Thunderbird 2.0.0.x

• Firefox 3.0.16 / Firefox 3.5.6
  • slushy code freeze for both releases
  • still have a couple of patches to take
  • otherwise, on track for mid-December release

IT

Bugzilla Update

• It's live!

This Week

• Planning for kernel updates Tuesday/Thursday

Release Engineering

• 4 new talos tests come online, go check out the results over on the graphserver:
  1. v8
  2. tsvg_opacity
  3. dirty+cold startup tests
  4. measuring x resources during linux tp4 runs
• reminder: need to file bugs to get new tests added to Talos

QA

Test Execution

• Shipped Fennec Beta 5. Test results here.
• Spotchecks for Fx3.6b3 today. ETA to ship to beta tuesday, 11/17
• Running Major Update test scenarios this week across all locales on the betatest channel. (2.0.0.20 -> 3.6b2 & 3.0.15 -> 3.6b2)
• Crashkill QA
  • Tabled out a nice wiki list of crashes that QA is investigating
  • New bugs filed last week: (bug 528658, bug 528645, bug 528261, investigating with STR: bug 527543 (Thanks Marcia!)

Web Dev Testing

• Shipped AMO 5.3
• Tested/deployed new drop of MDC from Mindtouch
• Handed off the What's New / First Run / Under the Hood pages to l10n
• Continued working through GetPersonas.com 2.0 bugs

Metrics, Accessibility, Localization, Community

• David fixed the a11y top crasher bug 525579 on mozilla-central today! See this blog post by MarcoZ for more info. MarcoZ has verified that this fixes the bug, and David is preparing a patch for the Firefox 3.6 branch.
• Held a Fennec beta 5 testday last friday. Attendance has dipped below 30, but there was 7 bugs filed. Please pass the word out of future testdays! Next testday will be on Nov 20th, on L10n community testing.
• Created a Preliminary Task List within the QA COG to help determine current projects/tasks for kids to sign up for (Independent High School in San Jose)
• No November meetup, will resume in December

Test Development

• Created final design test-agent code for Orodurin, got Windows Mobile XPCShell tests running both normally and on the device with the new design
• Implemented changes to the crash automation project to help streamline the workflow
• Worked with RelEng to bring up preliminary Ts Test for Windows Mobile, got it running in the RelEng framework (Thanks Aki!)

Security

No Updates this week

Marketing/PR

PR

Five Years of Firefox

General

Events

• Music Hack Day November 21-22, 200; Boston, MA.  We are sponsoring this event.
  
• Add-on-Con December 2009, Mountain View, CA.  We are sponsoring this event and will have 3 sessions:  Taking Flights with JetPack (Aza), Mobile Firefox Add-on Development (Mark Finkle), Future of Add-on Ecosystem (Justin, Nick, add-on developer community member).
  
• Foundations of Open Media Software January 13 - 15, 2010; Wellington, New Zealand.  Perfect venue to promote open video.  We are currently looking into sponsoring this.
• Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) 2010 January 20-22, 2010; Madrid Spain.  We are sponsoring this event.
  
• SXSW Interactive 2010  March 12-16, 2010; Austin, Texas.  Working on sponsorship oportunities and Firefox party.  Please continue to check our wiki page for information.
  
• Programming Languages and Analysis for Security (PLAS 2010) June 10, 2010; Toronto, Canada.  We are sponsoring this event.
  

Metrics

• User Outreach
  • Published first set of findings from our current program (at mozilla.com). #1 comments from users? “Firefox is great”.
  • However, there were two significant problems identified by users – (1) Open video on the firstrun page freezes, and (2) Firefox won’t remember a user’s settings (e.g., saving their homepage). A fix for this should be in the next release of Fx!

Evangelism

• New deki install in place - allows us to restart, now testing captchas to re-enable accounts.
• Paul Rouget has been busy. We'll start posting stuff next week.

Developer Tools

• Bespin Embedded 0.5 "preview release" went out on Friday. See the announcement blog post.

Foundation Updates

• We published a progress report on the Mozilla Education program in 2009, along with a list of professors and schools involved in Mozilla Education activities.